Snowtendo Entertainment System
The Snowtendo Entertainment System is an 8-bit console, released in 1985 with the game Super Brothers, and ending in 2000, with the game Penguin Micro: The Game. The console was very popular, until the Snowtendo WaddleBoy came in 1989, when Snowtendo thought of discontinuing the console, but the console was extended to 1994, when the console was then discontinued, but many penguins flipped out, and the console was extended to 2000, when the console was officially discontinued. Description All versions of the SES are predominantly gray, although the exact shade may differ. The original version has a boxy design with purple sliding switches and a dark gray eject lever. The latest versions are more rounded, with darker gray accents and buttons. The SNS-101 model and the Super Famicom Jr. (the SHVC-101 model) are both smaller with a rounded contour, however the SNS-101 buttons are purple where the Super Famicom Jr. buttons are gray. All versions incorporate a top-loading slot for game cartridges, although the shape of the slot differs between places in the Club Penguin Fanon Universe to match the different shapes of the cartridges. The card-edge connector has 62 pads, however many cartridges only connect to the middle 46. All versions also incorporate two 7-pin controller ports on the front of the unit, and a plug for a power supply and a Snowtendo-proprietary "MULTI-OUT" A/V connector on the back. The multi-out connector, later used on the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, can output RF, RGB, S-Video, and composite video signals.60 Original versions additionally include a 28-pin expansion port under a small cover on the bottom of the unit59 and a standard RF output with channel selection switch on the back; newer versions use the RF capability of the multi-out connector. Mild yellowing of one section The ABS plastic used in the casing of some older SNES consoles is particularly susceptible to oxidation on exposure to air, likely due to an incorrect mixture of the stabilizing or flame retarding additives. This, along with the particularly light color of the original plastic, causes affected consoles to quickly become yellow; if the sections of the casing came from different batches of plastic, a "two-tone" effect results.[ History To compete with the popular SES/Famicom, SEC launched the TurboGrafx-16/PC-Engine in 1987, and Sega followed suit with the Genesis/Mega Drive in 1988. Both systems were built on 16-bit architectures and offered improved graphics and sound over the 8-bit SES. However, the SES would continue to dominate the gaming market for several years before Sega's system finally became successful. Snowtendo executives were initially reluctant to design a new system, but they reconsidered when the SES hardware began to show its age. Seeing its dominance in the market slipping, Snowtendo was compelled to create a new console to compete with its 16-bit rivals. Video The picture processing unit (PPU) consists of two separate but closely tied IC packages, which may be considered as a single entity. It also contains 64 kB6 of SRAM for storing video data (VRAM), 544 bytes of object attribute memory (OAM) for storing sprite data, and 512 bytes of color generator RAM (CGRAM) for storing palette data. The PPU is clocked by the same signal as the CPU, and generates a pixel every two or four cycles. Both NTSC and PAL systems use the same PPU chips, with one pin per chip selecting NTSC or PAL operation. Images may be output at 256 or 512 pixels horizontal resolution and 224, 239, 448, or 478 pixels vertically. Vertical resolutions of 224 or 239 are usually output in progressive scan, while 448 and 478 resolutions are interlaced. Colors are chosen from the 15-bit RGB color space, for a total of 32,768 possible colors. Graphics consist of up to 128 sprites and up to 4 background layers, all made up of combinations of 8x8 pixel tiles. Most graphics use palettes stored in CGRAM, with color 0 of any palette representing transparency. Sprites can be 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, or 64x64 pixels, each using one of eight 16-color palettes and tiles from one of two blocks of 256 in VRAM. Sprites may be flipped horizontally and vertically as a whole. Up to 32 sprites and 34 8x8 sprite tiles may appear on any one line; exceeding these limits causes excess sprites or tiles to be dropped. Each sprite lies on one of 4 planes, however a lower-numbered sprite will always cover a higher-numbered sprite even if the latter is on a higher priority plane. This quirk is often used for complex clipping effects. Background layers in most modes range from 32x32 to 128x128 tiles, with each tile on one of two planes ("foreground" and "background") and using one of 8 palettes. Tiles are taken from a per-layer set of up to 1024 (as VRAM permits) and can be flipped horizontally and vertically. Each layer may be scrolled both horizontally and vertically. The number of background layers and the size of the palettes depends on the mode: Mode 0: 4 layers, all using 4-color palettes. Each BG uses its own section of the SNES palette. Mode 1: 3 layers, two using 16-color palettes and one using 4-color palettes. Mode 2: 2 layers, both using 16-color palettes. Each tile can be individually scrolled. Mode 3: 2 layers, one using the full 256-color palette and one using 16-color palettes. The 256-color layer can also directly specify colors from an 11-bit (RGB443) colorspace. Mode 4: 2 layers, one using the full 256-color palette and one using 4-color palettes. The 256-color layer can directly specify colors, and each tile can be individually scrolled. Mode 5: 2 layers, one using 16-color palettes and one using 4-color palettes. Tile decoding is altered to facilitate use of the 512-width and interlaced resolutions. Mode 6: 1 layer, using 16-color palettes. Tile decoding is as in Mode 5, and each tile can be individually scrolled. Mode 7: 1 layer of 128x128 tiles from a set of 256, which may be interpreted as a 256-color one-plane layer or a 128-color two-plane layer. The layer may be rotated and scaled using matrix transformations. HDMA is often used to change the matrix parameters for each scanline to generate perspective effects. Background layers may be individually pixelized, and layers and sprites can be individually clipped and combined by color addition or subtraction to generate more complex effects and greater color depths than can be specified directly.56 The PPU may be instructed to latch the current pixel position at any time during image output, both by game software and by the device attached to controller port 2. The game software may then read back this latched position. The PPU may also be used for fast 16-bit by 8-bit signed multiplication. Trivia *A notable accessory for it was the GamePhone. *It is an obvious parody of the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short. Internal Links * Link Category:Items